A man whose drunken driving left a child paralyzed was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison.

Fredrick Turner, 33, pleaded guilty in Columbia County Superior Court to two counts of vehicular injury and traffic offenses. Assistant District Attorney Robert Homlar said Turner’s blood-alcohol level was 0.186 when he crashed head-on into the victims’ vehicle.

Columbia County charter school proponents are ready for another turn at bat.

Organizers behind the proposed Columbia County School for the Arts have submitted new charter petitions to both the Columbia County Board of Education and to the State Charter School Commission, according to Todd Shafer, one of the founding members of the charter school effort.

Shafer said the group, which intends to establish the county’s first charter school, has revised its plan to address issues pointed out by state regulators in rejecting their initial petition last year.

The following accounts were taken from Columbia County Sheriff’s Office incident reports:

Grovetown High vandalized

Grovetown High School was recently vandalized.

While conducting a patrol at the school off William Few Parkway at about 3 a.m. on Thursday, a Columbia County Sheriff’s deputy saw several trees covered in toilet paper on the side of the school where the buses park. He also discovered that someone had thrown eggs on the doors on that side of the school.

The Bartram Trail trailhead in Columbia County will be closed temporarily for some upgrades.

The Petersburg Trailhead near Petersburg recreation area on Clarks Hill Lake was closed Tuesday and will remain closed for up to two weeks for a logger to thin out the timber, according to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Operations Manager Aaron Wahus. The timber thinning will make way for $100,000 worth of improvements to the trailhead.

Wahus said trailhead will be closed while the logger clears an area to double the size of the existing parking lot.

Just days after finishing sixth grade, 12-year-old Charlie is back in Washington, D.C., for the second year in a row, competing in the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

After winning local and regional spelling bees earlier in the year, he’ll be one of 285 spellers – including 103 first-time participants – from across the world hoping to get to Thursday’s final round and take home the title.